Origin Energy has brought a ''fracking'' roadshow to Canberra to win hearts and minds over to the controversial coal seam gas extraction technology.
A 12-tonne, 1km-long rock core sample from the Great Artesian Basin in Queensland went on display at Exhibition Park on Monday.
Origin experts have met up to 150 politicians, public servants, scientists and the media to explain how rock is ''fracked'' to release methane gas from coal seams buried hundreds of metres underground.
Their message is that most of the chemicals used are found in much higher concentrations in common household products and that great care is taken to protect the water table.
While the process is initially water intensive, once a gas field is in operation it can be used again and again.
Senators Barnaby Joyce and Bill Heffernan were among the critics of the process - which has been slammed as risky and inappropriate in documentaries such as Gasland and media reports - who took advantage of the opportunity to learn more.
Origin's production technology stakeholder and projects lead, Peter Hoberg, said that was all the company had been hoping to achieve. The truth, not spin, was the object of the exercise.
''Our chairman, Grant King, recently quoted Alexis de Tocqueville's maxim that it is easier to believe a simple lie than a complex truth,'' he said.
''There is a lot of engineering and science behind what we do. Each well, even in the same field, is treated as an individual.''
Mr Hoberg said while the coal seam gas extraction process was complex, it could be explained.
''We are trying to show people the facts and let them come to their own conclusions.''
His colleague, Origin's groundwater manager Andrew Moser, said the core sample on display in Canberra had been drilled in the Surat Basin - a part of the Great Artesian Basin.
It is part of the largest core study ever undertaken in the area and identified a 330m-thick coal seam starting at about 445m under the ground.
While the cost of recovering coal from that depth was uneconomical, the gas - produced in part by heat and pressure and, to a lesser extent, by extremely hardy bacteria - was another matter.
High-pressure water is used to fracture the rock strata to allow the gas to come to the surface.
Mr Moser said hundreds of metres of impermeable rock separated the coal layer, the product of compressed vegetation from the Jurassic era, from the aquifers used by the region's cattle farmers.
The core sample left Canberra by road yesterday and will be displayed at Chinchilla and Roma in the near future.
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